It
may be crude (although I think Roman would approve) but when I think of the Succession finale, my mind immediately
goes to something called a “ruined *rga*m.” For the unaware, a ruined *rga*m is
when a woman manipulates a man right to the edge of climax and then withdraws
the source of stimulation, thereby denying him the pleasure of a happy ending. And,
much like the frustration I imagine one feels when this is done in the bedroom,
so too did Jesse Armstrong tease Kendall Roy’s ascension to the throne only to
pull his hand away at the last second, depriving us of the release we so
desperately craved.
The
show’s ending was particularly frustrating because the rest of the show’s
fourth season was outstanding. There were no wasted episodes, much less wasted
scenes and the storytelling moved at an often frenetic pace. From Logan’s shocking
death to a disputed presidential election, and the tug of war over GoJo’s
attempted acquisition of Waystar, it was exceptional entertainment, and Kendall
was at the center of it all. The tragic figure we had watched try, over and over,
to reach the top rung of the ladder finally found his mojo. Whether it was his
powerful eulogy at Logan’s funeral or his charismatic performance when pitching
Living+, it appeared our number one boy would finally “win,” giving us the
satisfying ending viewers (or at least *this* viewer) long sought.
Instead,
Armstrong pulled a last second switcheroo by having Shiv, who had agreed to
back Kendall and block the company’s sale, switch sides in a moment of
boardroom skullduggery that landed her husband, Tom Wamgsgans, in the big
chair.
There were two problems with this. One is superficial. The ending was lazy
insofar as it recycled a plot line from Season One when Kendall attempted to
remove Logan from power and was stymied by a single vote, except there it was Roman,
not Shiv, who double crossed him. The other, and the focus of this essay, is
more substantive. Simply put, the ending did not make sense within the universe
Armstrong created.
The
show was called “Succession” not “Three Kids Don’t Know How To Share One Toy”
which is basically how it ended. From the very first episode, the audience was
conditioned to believe that one of Logan Roy’s children would, um, succeed him as head of Waystar – a point
reinforced time and again. Most of that season (and season three) focused on
Kendall’s attempt to force his way into leadership, the season two premiere
included scenes where both Shiv and Roman pitched their vision of the company’s
future hoping to be named their father’s successor,
and the codicil to Logan’s will reflected his wish that Kendall take over upon
his passing. That
one of the kids was in line to lead the company after Logan’s passing finds
further support in the fact that when two non-family members – Rhea Jarrell and
Gerri Kellman – held the CEO title, their reigns were incredibly short, with
one leaving in disgust (Rhea) and the other dismissed as a mere place holder
(Gerri).
Moreover,
the show’s ethos emphasized the cutthroat environment Logan created. We were
told, in various ways, that Logan gauged the mettle of his children either by how
much abuse they could take
or which one could assert dominance over the other.
His leadership included sadistic games like “boar on the floor” and he
explained to Kendall that business is like a knife fight in the mud. In other
words, Ken, Shiv, and Roman were all raised to believe in a Darwinian worldview
where the only objective is winning, regardless of what needs to be done to
achieve that goal.
And
Season Four (until the board room) affirmed that philosophy. While the kids
were working together on a project after being expelled from Logan’s kingdom,
once he died, the knives came out – as Logan had raised them to do. After Ken
and Roman were named co-CEOs, Shiv immediately started plotting against them,
looking for her own way to run the company by partnering behind their backs
with Lukas. When Roman tapped out of the competition, incapable of processing
the havoc he helped create with Mencken’s tainted victory, a final battle
between Ken and Shiv was teed up, except when Greg’s handy intel confirmed that
Lukas had no intention of appointing Shiv as Waystar CEO, her reaction was not
to line up behind Kendall (and concede his win) but rather, to stab him in the
back and support her husband, who she despised,
never mind the fact that at Logan’s memorial service, the kids agreed one of
them should run the company. In other words, not only did Armstrong go against
the show’s moral philosophy (winner take all), he did so in a way that was not
even consistent with his own storyline!
This
is particularly true because Kendall’s arc in season four so clearly reflected
his growth into Logan’s logical successor. Prior to Logan’s death, there was
always an air of insecurity around Kendall. He could get rattled easily in
meetings and always seemed to be either second guessing his own decisions or
thinking about how Logan would react to them. But after his father’s death, all
that washed away. The old Kendall, who melted under the lights, was replaced by
a new Kendall, self-assured in front of crowds whether he was pitching a
retirement community, praising his father from the pulpit, or standing up to
Lukas’s schoolyard taunts.
In
addition to his public facing glow up, Kendall was also deft at working angles
behind the scenes. When the company snoops learned that Lukas’s subscriber
numbers were made up, it is Kendall who sweet talks Ebba into revealing other
unsavory things about him. On the PR front, Kendall leveraged embarrassing
information on Hugo to get him to dirty up Logan (post-mortem and
off-the-record) with reporters, simultaneously giving Kendall a more positive
public image. He also recruited Colin to join his inner circle, knowing it is
invaluable to have an enforcer who can also keep his mouth shut. Time and again
we got confirmation that Kendall embodied Logan’s dark energy and people took
notice, be it the Waystar brain trust or the President-elect of these United
States. In short, Kendall did all the things within the universe Jesse Armstrong created to “win” but instead of
giving him that victory, the writers decided that Shiv would deny him the job
because she could not have it.
Huh?
Defenders
of the finale might argue that Logan was dismissive of his children and none
was qualified to take his seat. Indeed, the last time he saw them face to face,
he ridiculed them as not being serious people, to which I would respond in two
ways. First, ok, but if Logan thought so little of his children, why did he
keep handing them high level positions within his company?! But more seriously,
his analysis was both ungenerous and inaccurate and also ignored his own
failings as a leader. To be sure, as business executives, the three had their
failings. Kendall overpaid for Vaulter, the satellite launch Roman led literally
went kablooey, and Shiv sat by quietly when her father decided to cut Ken loose
and make him take the fall for the cruise line debacle knowing it was her
husband who was at least partly to blame.
But
for all the ink that was spilled writing about Succession, you would be hard pressed to find anything with the
title “Are We Sure Logan Roy Is Good At
His Job?” It was a question that was never grappled with because of the
force of his personality and ability to best his rivals (not to mention the
narrative requirement that everyone else have a ring to chase), but if you get past
the gruff insults and bullying behavior, you realize that Logan Roy was not that
good at his job and it was his kids (the ones he claimed were not serious
people) who bailed him out over and over again, all in service of showing they
were capable of succeeding him!
Consider
that almost every crisis at Waystar is triggered by some dumb decision Logan makes,
starting at the beginning of Season One with Logan not telling Kendall (his
supposed heir apparent) about a clause in the company’s debt agreement allowing
its lenders to call in their notes if the company’s stock drops below a certain
level. When Logan fell ill and the stock price tumbled, Ken solved this problem
by bringing in Sandy and Stewy in exchange for board seats and the purchase of
a minority stake in the company. Logan may have been unhappy with Ken’s
decision, but was he really in a position to question it?
In
Season Two, Logan’s deal for PGM is scuttled because the cruise line scandal is
exposed. We learn that the person responsible for preying on cruise line
employees sexually was a guy named Lester McLintock, one of Logan’s “wolf pack”
cronies who the kids knew as “Mo” (“mo-lester”) and whose conduct was an open
secret within the company.
It is left to the kids to clean up the mess. Roman is sent to Turkey in search
of a sovereign wealth fund deal that would take the company private while
Kendall and Shiv do damage control in Washington, D.C.; the former, by giving a
full-throated defense of his father in front of a Senate Committee hearing and
the latter by talking a female whistleblower out of testifying. Their efforts
stop the bleeding, but the thanks Ken is given for protecting his father is
Logan’s demand he take the blame for a problem not of his doing.
Of course, none of this would have been needed had Logan fired Mo long ago
instead of sweeping his crimes under the rug. That fact notwithstanding, Logan
also had the option of stepping down as Chair and CEO of the company in the
wake of the scandal but threw Ken under the bus instead.
Logan’s
penchant for secrecy involving his health would also come back to bite him in
Season Three when Sandy and Stewy’s takeover bid
came up for a vote before the shareholders. During the meeting, Logan forgets
to take medication for his urinary tract infection, causing him to become
delirious. Shiv again steps into the breach to hammer out a settlement with Sandi
Furness when it looks like the shareholder vote will not go the family’s way,
yet Logan criticizes his daughter’s actions like an arsonist complaining that
the fire fighter did not douse the flames correctly. In short, when the company
was in trouble because of one of Logan’s bad decisions, it was his supposedly
inept children who cleaned up the mess.
These
defensive moves are in addition to the affirmative ones the kids made at
various points to further their father’s objectives. For example, when things
looked iffy with Nan Pierce, Kendall got the deal over the finish line by
befriending Naomi Pierce and convincing her to vote for it. He is also the
first one to see the benefit of Waystar’s acquisition of GoJo and Roman is the
one who connects with Lukas at Ken’s birthday party to build a relationship
with the enigmatic Swede. Long story short, the idea that the kids were
failures while their father was some master of the universe is belied by the events
in series itself. Logan’s screw ups were as bad (if not worse) than anything
the kids did and the kids constantly swooped in to save the day when he did
screw up, yet the idea they were ill-equipped to succeed him somehow become
show canon.
Another
defense of the show’s ending might be that Logan viewed his kids as privileged
and not having had to work for their success. “Make your own pile” he spits at
them at the end of Season Three when he casts them out into the wilderness. Contrast
the Roy children with Lukas, who we are led to believe built GoJo from scratch
(and perhaps someone in whom Logan saw a little of his younger self), and Tom,
a Midwesterner who does not come from money. Aren’t those two more simpatico
with Logan’s view that success is earned not inherited? Perhaps, but do either
of these men hold up to closer scrutiny?
Start
with Tom. He may come from humble beginnings, but a middle class upbringing is
not the sole qualification to take over as CEO. Regardless, Tom did not “earn”
his pile any more than the Roy kids. He benefitted from a similar form of
nepotism by dint of his dating and then marrying Shiv because he literally had
zero executive skill! Among his failings? He orchestrated a ham-handed attempt
to destroy evidence of the cruise line scandal, gave such poor testimony in
front of the Senate he was referred to as a “smirking block of feta cheese,”
used his own underling as a human foot stool, outsourced the firing of hundreds
of ATN employees to Greg, and could not even meet the low bar of getting a
proper slogan for the channel. If there was a “failson” in the group, it was
him! Even more, while he would have been the logical person to take the fall
for the cruise line scandal, Shiv saved him from the chopping block. In fact,
Tom’s defining trait was loyalty (not necessarily a bad thing) to Logan, not a
high level of business acumen and yet, in the dog-eat-dog world Jesse Armstrong
created, we are supposed to believe that the actual qualities most valuable in
getting to the top are blind subservience and mediocre job performance? Sorry, not buying it.
As
for Lukas, you will never convince me Waystar was better off in his hands. For
one thing, as Kendall noted, Lukas did not understand Waystar’s business. Lukas
wanted to convert one of the company’s primary sources of revenue – ATN – into
a “Bloomberg grey” channel that would presumably just barf out news about Wall
Street (hardly a ratings generator!) Such a decision would have been
particularly stupid considering GoJo was going to need all the money it could
get to service the debt it surely took out to buy Waystar, not to mention the
company’s stock was going to take a hit over its inflated subscriber numbers.
Speaking of subscriber numbers, do we really think a guy who did that is going
to be a good steward of an even bigger company? And, like Kendall, Lukas is (at
a minimum) a recreational drug user who gets high with his employees, but
unlike Kendall, Lukas also sexually harasses his underlings, opening him (and
the company) up to significant liability (not to mention lots and lots of bad
PR). Finally, much of his public image is built on a lie that he is some genius
computer coder, which, if exposed, might also damage his company’s brand. Put
differently, Lukas engages in wonky business practices, treats his employees
terribly, and is not the tech genius his minions portray him to be, and yet, this guy is somehow more worthy of
“winning” in the end? Again, not buying it.
The
final argument in support of the ending is the most basic and the one Shiv
relied on: Ken was responsible for the death of another human being and that ipso facto disqualified him from leading
the company. Now I will admit, there is something to be said for this, although
I think we can all agree Ken did feel remorse for his actions. But within the Succession universe, there are a couple
of other problems with this argument.
First,
Shiv was every bit as amoral as everyone else on the show. She knew about the
Dodds incident all the way back at Chiantishire and it did not stop her from
teaming up with Ken and Roman, first to try and block the sale of Waystar and
then, when that failed, working together to buy Pierce. If she was so offended
by Ken’s actions, why did she suddenly get religion at the eleventh hour? It is
not like Shiv had some shiny moral compass guiding her. To take one example,
the first time Shiv talks one-on-one with Lukas, he’s snorting cocaine and
telling her about how he sent frozen blood bricks to his communications
director after their relationship ended. Shiv’s reaction was to provide crisis
consulting on how to make the problem go away, not concern over Lukas’s
abhorrent behavior.
Second,
Shiv understood the value of blackmail. To go back to the cruise line scandal,
Shiv used information about it not once
but twice during the series to her advantage. The first time, she was
working for Gil Eavis and threatened to use it against Waystar if ATN did not
stop attacking Eavis on air. The second time was when she convinced Kara not to
testify in front of the Senate by offering her money to stay silent. In neither
case did Shiv care one bit about the women Mo assaulted or the Waystar
employees whose deaths were never investigated.
No, she just cared about using incriminating information to her advantage.
Since it is clear she 1) knew how to blackmail people and 2) was not afraid to
do so, why would she back her estranged husband and a guy who snubbed her twice
instead of her brother, who she had enormous leverage over? The chances that
Shiv would have any meaningful role in a GoJo-led Waystar were zero, but all
she needed to do was threaten to go public with what she knew about Kendall’s
role in Andrew Dodds’s death and he would have had no choice but to put her in
a senior role in the company. In other words, why bother spending 39 episodes
drilling into our heads that these are the rules by which your universe
operates only to decide in the second-to-last-scene of the entire series that
they no longer apply? It just does not make sense.
In
the end, maybe none of this matters and maybe that was the point. GoJo’s
acquisition of Waystar would likely make Kendall, Shiv, and Roman billionaires
who would never want for anything (at least financially) for the rest of their
lives. Instead, each is left staring into the middle distance, wrestling with
the same questions as the rest of us – Who
Am I and What Do I Want To Do With My Life? In other words, all the time we
spend with these characters was supposed to tell us that money can’t buy
happiness. No kidding.
If
you’re interested in what an alternate, post-finale ending might look like,
check out:
Succession– Six Months Later (Kendall’s Revenge)
If
you want to read my episode-by-episode recaps, they can be found here
It is
also worth noting that the kids sniff out Logan’s plan to make another run at
PGM and outbid him for the company.
This also reinforces
the first point. Shiv is not some beacon of virtue, and excused and defended
all manner of sleazy behavior by other people if it meant it helped her get
ahead. That she was some beacon of virtue who could not stomach the idea of
Kendall taking over based solely on the Dodds incident rings particularly
hollow.